


Asuka Strikes Again!

by Shadowjack



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Dialogue-Only, Interviews, Post-Canon, Ten Years Later, What If Canon Was In-Universe Fiction?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:42:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26953072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadowjack/pseuds/Shadowjack
Summary: An interviewer asks Asuka her opinion of the based-on-a-true-story TV seriesNeon Genesis Evangelion.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10





	Asuka Strikes Again!

**Author's Note:**

> Done for a writing prompt: "What if various canons were actually in-universe fiction?"

**Q: Speaking of history and stories—**  
  
A: Aaaaaaauuuuuugh yes okay let’s talk about the TV series.  
  
**Q: How accurate is _Neon Genesis Evangelion_ in presenting the events that led up to Third Impact?**  
  
A: …  
  
**Q: It’s based on Shinji Ikari’s book, supposedly.**  
  
A: Yes, they used that as the primary source. You can tell the director identified with Shinji as a character. And… look, Shinji sweated over that book, sucked me into editing, he worked late nights, insisted on doing every interview he could, and he _hates_ doing that stuff. He said it was his duty, which it wasn’t, but there it is. And it paid off: it’s the best account I know of the entire mess, by far, and I’ve read most of them. So the TV series crew… they worked very hard.  
  
**Q: So… you think it’s bad.**  
  
A: Well… It _looks_ right. I don’t know how they did it, they got the entire material culture of the mid-teens right there. The hair, the cars, the TVs – I had forgotten that awful dress, but there it is, right out of some photo. You really do get a sense of the size and the sterility of the base. And they followed the actual combat footage very closely. The Units look right, Mama looks and moves right. The cockpits seemed a little much more cramped, and synchronization didn’t look like that from our perspective, but dramatic license. They got it close enough there.  
  
**Q: That’s for vision. How about sound?**  
  
A: The music is the first thing I think of. NERV’s PA system would run this horrible old Japanese pop, I mean, _old_ , pretty much constantly between announcements and safety warnings, you couldn’t get away from it. And the show, they make it seem like Shinji was the only one who listened to music. For me, I think of that decade and I think of the Bangles. I would listen to “Hazy of Shade of Winter” over and over until someone would pound on the wall, and then I would switch to heavy metal music to spite them. And I remember Rei got _obsessed_ with an American band called Tool for couple of months there. Maybe the showrunners didn’t want to license all that music, all they put in there was a little of Shinji’s Bach.  
  
What else did they leave out? Well, they don’t talk a whole lot about who _paid_ for everything, do they? A few shady boardroom scenes, nothing about – I shouldn’t say names, right? They’ll brigade your website. _A certain wonderful country_. Or _the other wonderful country_. Or _certain businesses_ which are still around, amazingly. Don’t want a lawsuit!  
  
**A: (laughs) I think we’ll be fine.** _(Editor’s Note: For more on this topic, see our in-depth article **here**.)_  
  
A: I guess they were going for a ground-level view, but they mostly ignored the actual politics and focused on trivial stuff like child abuse. I’m allowed to make that joke.  
  
**Q: Focusing on the salacious instead of the more systemic issues.**  
  
A: Yes, exactly. There was nothing in the show about the casual racism. They make it seem like I was the only _gaijin_ in Tokyo-3, and that everyone was okay with me, instead of it being one of the most _international_ cities in the world and, well “hated” is too strong a word, but there was… I think that motivated much of the JSSDF massacre, that so much of NERV were not Japanese. I remember once I overheard some technicians saying things about Ritsuko… she bleached her hair blonde, so she was a race traitor, and they wanted to… You can imagine that adding to all my other anxieties. If they talk about the _Doctor_ that way, if _I_ fuck up…?  
  
What else? Oh, all the simplifications. They make it look like the same three people were on the bridge every time, they left out Captain Mayer, they left out the post-launch procedures which took forever, nothing about the weird cult of celebrity around us, they left out a lot of my self-harm, they made it look like I hated my Papa, which I didn’t really. Their version of me is more this… quirky _tsundere_ , rather than the sullen bitch I really was. I was terrible. I think I was worse in Japan because I was embarrassed about my accent – _sie show does nicht gib me ein aksent!_  
  
**Q: (laughs)**  
  
A: One line about me being bad at kanji and that’s what we get. The show is maybe _too_ forgiving, I think. Shinji thinks it portrays him well, but I think it leaves out a lot of his little kindnesses, makes him too much a problem… and they leave out Rei, Jesus!  
  
They skip over the whole time we made friends and make it seem like we were rivals the whole time. One bowl of ramen and that’s it. Nothing about Rei’s sense of humor – she would wait for just the right moment, then _kill_ you with a joke. How the hell do they make a _secondary_ character out of the the First Child?! Just because she didn’t talk much, maybe, so they couldn’t figure out what to do with her?  
  
**Q: Maybe they thought it wouldn’t fit with the tone of the show.**  
  
A: Probably. The last time we went for brunch together, some people recognized her and started to get weird about it, like happens. She started ordering screwdrivers – and made me get Bloody Maries – and would drink them _real slow_ and creepy, like a vampire, making eye contact with the jerks the whole time until they left in a hurry. We were _plastered_. They make her seem like a virgin martyr. She was a victim, yeah, but she had agency, too.  
  
You know, it’s funny, I’ve heard many times from different people that _comedies_ provide a better view of their profession than dramas. Like, medical doctors always say that old show _Scrubs_ was true to life, and _Spinal Tap_ for the music business.  
  
**Q: You’re saying that _Strange News out of Tokyo-3_ was more accurate than _Neon Genesis_? No. Please, no.**  
  
A: Almost! Half, three quarters of that show was entirely made up, of course, there was never a rock concert, we didn’t have sports equipment, the Commander didn’t stalk people. But the _mood_ – that was absolutely what it was like to work at NERV. You’d spend days in a bunker talking about a picnic, “Oh, someone got assassinated? Gosh!” then back to the picnic, and the picnic site’s under a gun turret, and then Misato would call us into a preprogrammed training scenario and _there’s the picnic site again_ and you deliberately blow it up in the simulator because how can you not. And that goddamn _enka_ music, every day. And all along, this _dread_ , this… death coming closer every day. It was insanity.  
  
**Q: What about the ending of the series? _Evangelion_ , that is, which _Strange News_ parodies.**  
  
A: Oh, the ending is brilliant, both of them. How do you depict something that was a matter of the soul? It was a good approach, especially since everyone watching now was _there_ , right? No need to explain when we all went through it. I suppose the kids in a few years, Pandora’s Generation, will need some explaining to know that people didn’t _literally_ melt into orange goo, it’s metaphors. God, there’s a thought, they’ll be watching this thing in history class.  
  
Of course, the show just ends there, it doesn’t go into anything that happened after. Nothing about the Green Year, the (Re)Construction Authority, the Second Nuremberg Trials, “Asuka Lives” – ugh – nothing about the therapy and the school and our weird marriage and none of that.  
  
**Q: Maybe that could be another show.**  
  
A: Well, give another decade, and maybe Shinji will write that book, too. This time I could play myself, change careers again.  
  
– excerpt from “Asuka Strikes Again! Close and Personal with the Second Child (Now a Woman)”, _Teen Vogue_ , September 2025 Special Dual Impact Memorial Issue.


End file.
